"It’s the question every writer faces, every morning of his or her life: Am I Malcolm Gladwell today, or am I Arthur Rimbaud? Do I sit down with my pumpkin latte and start Googling, or do I fire a couple of shots into the ceiling and then stick my head in a bucket of absinthe?"
August Music Mix
Here! Here are the tunes I keep going back to this month. Good, chill end-of-summer stuff for your ears to hear.
Around the House
Can't won't will not believe it's August already. It's my birthday month and I really wanted to plan a solo trip somewhere to celebrate. Stockholm for four days? Too last minute? Maybe something closer. Grand Marais? Pretty much the same thing, right?
If you haven't yet, hop over to my sister's food blog to read about my whiskey drink called the Paris Stranger. Also, I wrote about not falling in love in a cafe in Paris. My dad read it and it made him tear up for some reason. Then my parents said they were glad I didn't talk to the stranger because he was probably a jerk. Huh?
Also, here are some pics from my summer at home. It's as lovely as it looks and then some.
This isn't home. It's the pizza farm near Lake Pepin in Wisconsin that everyone in Minneapolis has been visiting. It's only open on Tuesday nights, takes about an hour-and-a-half to drive to, and you have to wait another hour-and-a-half for the pizza. So, by the time you eat, it's the best thing you've ever tasted. It's some sort of beautiful, farmy, psychological pizza trick.
Delicate Delicate
An old and quiet cover of Damien Rice's Delicate.
And a photo:
Jerusalem Syndrome
Humans are weird:
"There is an actual medical condition called Jerusalem Syndrome. Each year, it afflicts hundreds of people when they go to Israel and are so religiously moved that they become convinced God is speaking to them, and that they are the Messiah. There is a dedicated wing in the psychiatric ward at a hospital in Jerusalem that deals with these people. I met a psychiatrist who works there, and asked her what the treatment is.
"It is easiest if there is more than one patient in the clinic at a time," she told me. "The best way to snap them out of it is usually to introduce them to each other."
I love that image - the guy who is sure he's the Messiah meeting another guy who is sure he's the Messiah, and immediately going, "Oh. Well, that guy sounds crazy. Never mind."
- Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding